This invention relates to pallets constructed from paperboard, and more particularly to pallets constructed from cylindrical paperboard cores or tubes.
As discussed in Carter U.S. Pat. No. 5,067,418, assigned to the common assignee of the instant application, large amounts of thick walled paperboard or fiber cores or tubes are used by various industries. Paper, paperboard, carpet, cloth and plastics are wound about such cores and, after removal of these products from the cores, the cores must be disposed of.
Cores of this type can vary in length and generally have a four inch, five inch or six inch outside diameter with a wall thickness of at least 0.3 inch with a range up to 0.750 inch. The problems involved in disposing of heavy wall cores or tubes was pointed out and discussed in the aforesaid patent and an ecological solution to the disposal of spent cores was provided by a pallet constructed from such paperboard cores forming longitudinally extending runners and having a deck formed from a number of elongated arcuate segments of cylindrical paperboard cores in accordance with the disclosure and teachings thereof. In that patent, the arcuate deck segments are positioned within aligned dovetail notches in the runners. Other notches in the bottom of the runners received arcuate segments of cores to form lower brace members. Although pallets constructed in this manner proved to be commercially successful, the success was somewhat limited by the manufacturing process.
In an effort to reduce the manufacturing costs, the improved pallet disclosed in Carter U.S. Pat. No. 5,816,172 was developed in which runner receiving arcuate grooves are cut in the deck segments to aid in connecting the deck members to the runners rather than cutting dovetail notches in the runners. The runners thus did not have to be notched except to provide lift fork tine receiving recesses. Moreover, a base comprising slats was secured to the runners except at the tine receiving recesses. Although pallets constructed in accordance with U.S. Pat. No. 5,816,172 have had great success, they are relatively heavy and, in addition, use of pallet jacks rather than fork lift tines present a problem. A pallet jack, as opposed to a fork lift, has tines which are of a fixed width which have upper surfaces that are three inches high at the lowest position, i.e., before the jack is raised. Thus, depending upon the outside diameter of the runner tubes, they may be of insufficient height for the pallet jack tines to be received within the recesses. Moreover, this becomes even more of a problem when the base slats are removed in an effort to reduce the weight of the pallet because the bottoms of the runner tubes then sit directly on the floor thereby lowering the elevation of the tops of the runners.